Posts from the ‘Communication’ Category

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Catching the attention of buyers is done differently today. In the digital world we live in today, classic interruption marketing is less and less effective.

Applying traditional marketing tactics in the online world doesn’t work.

In your case as a marketing professional, you are constantly looking for insight, trends, best practices and how-to-do stuff. You are blind for advertising, you use Google as your best friend, follow RSS feeds of major marketing blogs, and subscribe to newsletters. Right?

What catches your attention? As digital marketers we are constantly flooded with whitepapers, ebooks, ultimate guides and webinars.

Not all of them are of the same quality.

Butsometimes you encounter brilliant, well researched, and extensive ebooks.

In this blog post I want to share some of the best ebooks I have found in 2014. Each and every piece is really useful, practical, visual, and something you want to save on your PC.

With the holiday period coming up, you might have some time to read some of them ;-).

The debate about outbound marketing being “interruption” marketing, and inbound marketing about “deserving the attention of buyers” is actually a flawed argumentation.

The question is about how you successfully go about in combining inbound and outbound marketing.

It is true that traditional advertising is less effective.

People today like to skip TV commercials when they can. They are blind for online banners (on average 0,2% click on banners). They sign-out for telephone calls (2 out of 3 people in USA are on do-not-call list). And they opt-out of commercial email, with Google Gmail helping them with easy opt-out buttons.

But when you combine the inbound philosophy with the power of outbound, both re-enforce each other. Combining inbound and outbound marketing works when you:

Using advertising to create awareness, with messages they care about.

Paid content promotion about content they want to read.

Send emails that are relevant to them

Use outbound call center calls that are timed and relevant to them as respond to a pre-qualified need.

OK, a little warning is appropriate here. This is a blog post where I slightly get out of my comfort zone because I am actually going to tell you a story.

Before you go all mellow and zap away, bare with me for a second. Just listen to me for a while, and you’ll begin to see a much bigger trend currently happening in marketing. Using a few brilliant examples I’ll explain the bigger trend behind visual storytelling, and how it should transcend to become part of everything you do in your marketing.

What follows is a true story, but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you: I am not the best storyteller.

What change is needed in an organization to be successful with content marketing?

Answering todays marketing challenges is a daunting task for most of us.

Not only is marketing increasingly becoming a digital environment, marketing itself is changing. Buyers demand value on top of existing products and services. They want you to inspire them, educate them, and entertain them.

Embracing a content marketing culture is the first step towards becoming a social business. It is the first step to creating marketing that people actually want.

It requires great, or small changes, depending on your current corporate culture:

from outbound to inbound

from self-centric to meaningful

from classic to digital

from art to science

Here are some of the key change management essential ingredients you need to take into account when changing a company towards a content marketing culture:

I’m looking at it and I just don’t quite get it. Banner ads don’t work, and yet marketers still keep investing in it. According to a recent article in Smart Insight click-through rates remain impressively low with “banner blindness” as a key reason for ignoring ads.

One day, someone needs to explain me why a marketer doesn’t get fired by the CEO for spending thousands of ad euros and reporting a conversion of 0.2%. But let’s keep that discussion for another time.

Native advertising. They are the latest addition to digital advertising land. Named as the “disruptive” technology that will change the advertising business model. It is considered the fresh air that the beleaguered publishers need.

Providing enough relevant content to buyers is one of the biggest concerns of marketers today, according to a recent study of CMI.

But how do you know which content is relevant to your buyers?

Showing business value is not differentiating

Building buyer insight is an important activity of marketers, resulting in buyer persona descriptions, or buyer insight maps as I often call them. Based on that buyer insight, content is created that shows the business value of your products or services.

The problem is that your competitors are doing the exact same thing.Read more

A few days after I had trained some people about sharing on social media, I received an email from an account manager.

He was afraid we would be sharing too much details about what we do with customers. He was afraid we would give away to much information to competitors. And I heard the same remark of CEO’s holding back on press releases about customers wins because it could hurt the business.

This is an often heard dilemma: you make great new customers, you create fantastic webinars for customers, you do thought leadership speaking slots, and make customer cases. But by sharing this content publicly you are afraid you are providing valuable information to competitors. And that might hurt your business.

I do understand these reasons, I used to think the same. But companies that keep thinking like this will soon be gone. If you don’t want that, you’ll have to make a cultural shift to being open and authentic.

The word “content” in Content Marketing deserves more credit. Will you vote ? (image : Amsterdamnewspolitics)

Whenever I talk to fellow marketing managers about Content Marketing, I feel as if the word “content” in itself just kills the whole conversation.

When the word content is used, people think of text. They think of paper, copywriting, layout, online and print. Some are more informed, and know that content marketing is more than the output of content creators.

Content marketing is all about providing customers with answers to their questions. The format in which these answers are delivered to them is irrelevant. By providing these answers, you lift your brand to become a company that is seen as a go-to-resource for knowledge and insight. By providing these answers you become a trusted party to which they’ll turn to when they have a problem, a question, an opportunity.

1920 Experiment : Karl Krall (on the right) tried to detect the thinking radiation he assumed to flow between the dog and the human. (source: http://www.weirdexperiments.com)

This isn’t a blog post about how good content marketing is, and that you should stop advertising. Quite the contrary.

Allow me to explain: advertising had been shifting to online. It’s been shifting online for a while now. The most obvious reason for that is that people spend more time online. However, B2B marketers out there know that click-through rates are terrible. Leaderboard banners, skyscrapers, and what-ever-they-look-like-banners, get click-through rates below 1%.

And still online advertising seems to be growing, according to Google. There must be people who can explain that contradiction. I can’t.

Whatever.

It’s clear that online advertising just doesn’t work. Ask anyone you know which on-line ad they still remember, while we all spend hours per day online. The answer will be zero.

But let me tell you why B2B marketers still need to keep on advertising, on- and off-line… Read more

About this blog

This blog is not about me. It is about B2B marketing in todays digital world. It shares down to earth and practical tips on how to build marketing strategies, plan and execute them, as well as my own experiences on what I think differentiating marketing should be.

Opinions on this blog are mine.

About Tom De Baere

Everybody has a past, and everybody has experience. For me, my experience is 15 years in sales & marketing, in which I have developed a true passion for B2B marketing & communication.

Early 2014 I founded HappiFish, a company specialized in helping companies to create marketing that people actually want.